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You obviously are wasting your energy on people who should no longer matter to you. Suggestion, best revenge is to stop caring, and move on. Or, think of it this way, your "ex" still has power over you, do you want that?

First to mars or last, I'd still love to go. I love travel and it's been a dream of mine for as long as I can remember to go to space. I can't think of a more exciting place to travel than Mars. Even if I was not the first person to set foot on Mars. Just for the ability to see Earth from orbit, I'd go all the way to Mars. After seeing Earth from orbit, the rest is just gravy. Sure you might never make it back, but most people never have a chance to complete a lifelong crazy dream. Sign me up! So lo

You don't know that. If you stay, say, 30 years on Mars, they land more people and more equipment as the years go by, more and more frequently as the tech develops and matures. One day a return trip would certainly be available. It might not be cheap (in the beginning), but hey, if you have been working on Mars for 30 years, you might be able to afford it. If nothing else, your fame from being among the first martian explorers might land you a nice advertisement gig to pay for the trip home.

I won't pretend it's for mankind or science or anything like that - I'd be doing it because people would remember my name for having done something somewhat insane, with few harmful side-effects. That mankind would benefit or science would benefit is great, but it would be a side-effect.

Because I could carve a plaque that said "I was here first, bitch. Suck on that, you second-place losers." I would do my damndedst to ensure that I was remembered not only as the First Man On Mars, but also b

I suspect that most of the people who are applying are planning to take advantage of being on a reality tv show. Everything but the last round is going to happen on Earth, so the vast majority of the applicants know that they will never make it to Mars and simply want to take advantage of whatever fame and fortune come with being on the Mars One tv show over the next few years, which could be considerable.

Almost all of the applications that I have looked at seem to be from people with no useful skills (at least not ones that will be useful on Mars), little interest in going to Mars beyond stock statements like "it would be awesome" or "I want to be an astronaut", and very little skill in promoting themselves. The number of spelling errors in applicants from people in English-speaking countries is astounding. The quality of many of the videos is dismal. If these people really want to survive on Mars they n

What dying moments will be broadcast? Ideally, the travelers would survive long enough to set up a viable sustainable colony, whose expenses could be handled by a large enough trust fund. By the time they die of natural causes, the reality show would be long-since off the air.

In a less ideal situation, the travelers' catastrophic dying moments are broadcast to the world, and the travelers are martyrs in the ongoing process of human exploration. This is a known risk, which all the travelers must accept before volunteering. Why, then, would it be a problem to broadcast the unintentional deaths of these brave folks? The chance of their sudden death is something they accept... why can't we viewers accept it as well?

The chance of their sudden death is something they accept... why can't we viewers accept it as well?

This isn't a chance. It's a 1 way trip. They'll either die on Mars, die taking off, or die getting there. But, they *will* die.

Of course viewers will accept it, they'll embrace it -- pretty much like they embraced gladiatorial and watching public executions and watching decapitation videos on the internet.

I somehow doubt that a Mars mission funded by a reality show is going to create a viable self sustaining colony which allows these people to die of natural causes.

I can accept an astronaut signing up for something which is risky, but has a reasonable chance of working. But I'm a little creeped out by a guaranteed death sentence from a one way mission operated by a private company who wants to have a reality show.

Gladiators, executions, and snuff films differ from pioneering in one major aspect: the pioneers choose to take the risk. The AC summed up my opinion pretty well. Everybody dies. Every moment we live is another moment closer to our death... If someone has no better long-term plans, why not volunteer?

It's a simple gamble. The prize is an extremely valuable contribution to human exploration. The entry price is difficult communication with most other humans for the rest of your life, however long that may be. The risk is a sudden death.

Like every other wager, whether it's advantageous depends on the cost/benefit analysis. Someone who doesn't value their connections on Earth nearly as much as their contributions to science may find it perfectly reasonable to risk a sudden death for the chance to begin human planetary colonization. If that's their opinion and their choice, why not respect it?

There is a pervasive idea in Western culture that death is something tragic. We avoid death to the point where we spend our whole lives taking pills, exercising, and cowering in fear of what new deaths we might encounter. The very mention of death brings sadness into a party, and funerals are silent orgies of despair. Why must we all be such cowards? Let us go each day seeking new ways to die. Not merely new to each individual, but a death unlike any other in history. Now, the corollary to that is that we must avoid deaths that have been done before. Avoid heart attacks lying on the couch, avoid getting hit by a bus that you thought would stop, and avoid getting mauled by animals.

A natural death on Mars after a long career of science hasn't happened yet, and neither has a fiery death in a do-or-die effort to return a drifting interplanetary spacecraft. Let's do it [wikipedia.org].

I can accept an astronaut signing up for something which is risky, but has a reasonable chance of working. But I'm a little creeped out by a guaranteed death sentence from a one way mission operated by a private company who wants to have a reality show.

Life is a guaranteed death sentence. I'm not seeing how that's much different than not signing up... IMO, it's not how long you live, that's silly. You'll be dead (or unborn) for infinitely longer a time than alive. What counts is the journey, and what you do with your life.

Frankly, I've lost complete tolerance for any humans who aren't actively trying to do something about the problem of having all the eggs in one basket called Earth.

Well, thats not the quote I was looking for. It goes something like this "The first stage of insanity is believing you are sane". =) I wish I could fine the exact fortune database with it, because the guy who said it I believe was someone historically known for deep thought and their outlook on psychology or philosophy.

There are degrees of emotional stability. Most people are relatively stable, otherwise nothing would get done and we couldn't have a society. The folks that fit in well with society are generally not suitable for reality programming. It would be like going to a movie called "accounts: the motion picture" where they were actual accountants engaged in regular accounting practices. I shouldn't spoil it, but about halfway in, they find a misplaced comma and have to redo the numbers.

Agreed, but there are tons of people out there who could qualify for this without being deemed insane. Which I think is the parents argument. That anyone is insane for wanting their contribution to life be a mission to Mars on public T.V.

But I know there are at least a 100,000 more qualified people that will volunteer and do a better job then I on the mission. I imagine a lot of people have not volunteered for that very valid reason. So these look like pretty decent numbers to me, maybe a tiny bit low. But not bad.

I know there are at least a 100,000 more qualified people that will volunteer and do a better job then I on the mission

Being qualified for this "mission" only entails being expendable on Earth. This mission is most likely going absolutely nowhere, the real unknowns are what the showstopper is going to be. Will it be their tenuous grasp on basic science? Or perhaps the fact that they havn't got the faintest idea about how they're going to get to Mars in the first place? Maybe it'll be something completely different... We just don't know. Exciting times.

The "Catch-22" is that "anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy". Hence, pilots who request a mental fitness evaluation are sane, and therefore must fly in combat. At the same time, if an evaluation is not requested by the pilot, he will never receive one and thus can never be found insane, meaning he must also fly in combat.

They probably don't want anyone smart enough to see through the scam that it boils down to being. Kind of like the cold fusion guys some months back that didn't want an audience for their test run. What happened to those people anyways?

So? In this era of "liking" and "sharing" and "+1ing"... 78k "likes" isn't all that impressive. (And the vast majority probably aren't qualified and won't pass screening in the first place - they're just applying because it's "cool".)

I'm willing to bet that the combined ineptitude of the/. editor's have a better chance of setting foot on Mars using nothing but toilet rolls and bent spoons, than this mission has. It's a scam, the sign-up fee would be your clue.

What the summary fails to mention is that the "application fee" was at minimum $20 USD, and went upwards towards $40 USD depending on the country. Worst case scenario they made about $1.5 million off of applications alone. I would think that volunteering to permanently leave your life behind would be enough collateral without needing to nickel and dime applicants. This reeks of the space-equivalent of vaporware to me.

I signed up for the news letter and was planning on applying but they want 38 fucking dollars as a registration fee. Screw that. If I actually thought this was gonna go anywhere I'd gladly pay it. If it was 5 bucks or so I'd gladly pay it just on a lark even thinking as I do that this will probably amount to nothing. 40 bucks just to apply for something that will probably fail and that I probably won't get picked for even if it does succeed? Fuck that noise!

If I recall correctly, a trip of that amount of time and distance will expose people to all sorts of life shortening types of energy. I'm not sure I see the point of that trip without protection from all of that. Is there SPF-2000 yet?

The only way to determine if it is fake is to participate in it. Take "The Hunger Games" scenario for example. You can either stay back in your little agenda 21 district and watch it all play out on T.V.

Or you can step up and volunteer to play by the rules set forth. Then you can affect change from within the system. Or get to a point were you can demonstrate to everyone how fake it is.

It is a matter of perception. But the vast majority of people do not want to control their own destiny. Thats the simplest

The only way to determine if it is fake is to participate in it. Take "The Hunger Games" scenario for example. You can either stay back in your little agenda 21 district and watch it all play out on T.V.

Ha! Shows what you know. There are only 12 districts - okay, 13 [wikipedia.org], but we don't talk about them.

A) Their application process would seem to make this more difficult (you want people who aren't really interested in space so they are less informed and easier to fool)B) They are also talking about a multi-year training program, which would seem cost prohibitive and would also raise the risk of the participants finding out exponentially.

Mercifully it looks like the math error might be on the part of the poster rather than the article. I did a quick skim of the article and didn't see anywhere were they mentioned anything like how far apart people would be if stretched from coast to coast.

Of course it is always possible that the article was edited by the time I saw it but since the post doesn't appear to be a quote ripped from the site Occam's Razor is that the poster wrote up the post, did the math, and got it wrong.

I disagree. Sending people to Alpha Centauri no. Robotic spacecraft, yes we could totally get something there in a century, or even 50 years. Could we get something there that could send a signal back to us? Maybe not. You'd need to send a pretty big power plant to send a signal back that far for us to catch back here. But sending a probe thats small with a nuclear Orion engine yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) [wikipedia.org]

At 0.1c, Orion thermonuclear starships would require a flight time of at least 44 years to reach Alpha Centauri, not counting time needed to reach that speed (about 36 days at constant acceleration of 1g or 9.8 m/s2). At 0.1c, an Orion starship would require 100 years to travel 10 light years. The astronomer Carl Sagan suggested that this would be an excellent use for current stockpiles of nuclear weapons.[13]

By the way the engineering doesn't use anything un-real. Its all pretty standard stuff. I don't know if there was ever a test. Probably not, there's been to much hub bub about nuclear batteries on Cassini.

Just testing one would be a worth while mission though, which would probably fit in the budget of the DoD or even Nasa.